There is No Security Silver Bullet, but What if...

Breaking security challenges down to identify new approaches and innovations.

You know it: there is no silver bullet for today's IT security challenges. I mean no disrespect for industry security vendors. The security industry is working fast and furious to keep pace with a wild environment and ever-changing threat landscape. But ultimately, it's fundamentally impossible to have a single monolithic security solution that does it all, all the time.

Intel knows the environment you protect has never been tougher:

128 Million and growing quickly: No, it's not the population of Los Angeles (whatever your friends stuck in the I-5 commute tell you). It's the number of total malware samples reportedly in McAfee's database, according to the firm's Q1 Threats Report. And the last two quarters have seen major accelerations in growth of that number.

Your user's got an app for that! Recent research from market analyst firm Canalys found that in Q1 2013, the top four app stores hit 13.4 billion downloads. New apps downloaded by users can increase risk of malicious code making its way into the network, as well as increase vulnerabilities that can expose data.

Every user wants to bring their favorite device from home and get it connected to your network. The combination of PCs from different vendors along with Macs once seemed challenging; today your users insist on connecting their tablets and smartphones.

If that's not enough, how about the higher expectations for compliance and challenges keeping up with an evolving regulatory environment?

It's enough to induce a cold sweat in the bravest of us. So, how do you manage in situations that seem to be spiraling out of control?

We at Intel are working with customers and partners to help make sense of it all. Through our research and collaboration with information security experts, we've identified four common pain points and problems that plague technology users - from the average technology user all the way to the IT administrator trying to get good news out of the next month's indicators. Those pain points include:

Identity / Privacy Protection - How can I ensure that the user trying to get access to sensitive corporate resources is who they say? How do I best protect login credentials from compromise, theft and hijacking?

Data Protection- How can I ensure that intellectual property and other valuable company information stays where it belongs in my company, safe from attacks and tampering?

Anti-Malware - How do I create a multi-layered defense model that keeps malware from my infrastructure and endpoints? How do I detect and eliminate malware so my users can confidently go about their business?

Resiliency - Recognizing that some failures and problems are inevitable, how can we dramatically decrease downtime for security issues? How can we keep systems patched with the latest security updates to minimize risk of exposure to known security issues?

Breaking these problems down a bit, we might begin to identify new approaches and innovations that could help users like you sleep better at night.

Intel experts are working for you to reduce this complex reality through hard security research, to scrutinize and to drive toward thoughtful solutions by asking "what if?" In subsequent blogs, I'll examine and explore each of these pain points in more detail and ask the questions, "What if we could do something to lessen or even eliminate this worry? How would that solution look? How would it work? How could it become sustainable?"

Data protection/compliance as it relates to options like Dropbox is certainly near the top of many worry lists. I recently listened to a senior IT exec at a bank describe how his folks wink and nod at the instruction not to use cloud file storage services.

There's no doubt Google has made headway into businesses: Just 28 percent discourage or ban use of its productivity ­products, and 69 percent cite Google Apps' good or excellent ­mobility. But progress could still stall: 59 percent of nonusers ­distrust the security of Google's cloud. Its data privacy is an open question, and 37 percent worry about integration.